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To use the technical Latin, my ailment seems to be half a nervous breakdown following a year or more of the inaudible screaming meemies.
Toward the end of 1970 I began to realize that I might have to believe the unbelievable: that the basic nerve and will by which I had always been able to survive my difficulties might have worn out or broken and might not be readily reparable. I kept expecting a spontaneous remission; I kept telling myself that my job problems were remediable by a little extra effort-- just a matter of getting over the hump. When I finally realized that I should quit the Journal entirely, I still wanted to get the backlog cleared up and the records in my head down on paper and a reasonable situation presented to my successor. And this supposedly minor task became--unaccountably, irrationally--the one thing I couldn't get myself to do.

In all this explication you will notice that I am not thoroughly intropunitive. I do think that a substantial part of my half-nervous-breakdown has stemmed from an unfortunate set of circumstances beyond my control. Though you will find it a futile exercise, I will be intropunitive to this extent:

When I got the screaming meemies I should have screamed audibly and stamped my foot and insisted that something must be done. You know, or don’t know that one must keep the dignity of responsibility for one’s own acts. At least, that’s the only dignity I have been able to achieve in this world and I am extremely reluctant to let go of it. I guess one should have more than that one kind of dignity, and so be able to let go of that one kind at a critical moment and scream audibly and let one’s good friend help... I still believe that I must make do with what I have, even in an unkindly climate, and that the helpfulness of friends has limits which we all prefer not to recognize.

Unkindly climate: so many of our institutions and arrangements, inhabited by humans, make only the tiniest allowances for the years of ebullience and the years of desperation which a human being is likely to encounter in his life. We cannot take full advantage of our ebulliences and we cannot reasonably survive our desperations. Perhaps this is only the jaundiced conclusion of an “unstable” personality. But there are an awful lot of us “unstable people”. Stability comes to mean no ebulliences as well as no despairs.

The helpfulness of friends: in our particular society, social support of an individual in trouble sticks out like a sore thumb instead of being merged in the fabric. Trouble is thought of as non-routine, and helping a troubled person becomes a matter of much self-consciousness and conscience. This corrupts both the helper and the helped. “Corrupts” is perhaps too strong of a verb in many cases, and yet there is a reverberating disturbance in a relationship that changes from that of “equals” in some general sense, to that of helper and helped. I suppose that is expectable in a society that is primarily competition- oriented and success-oriented. There are a few, but very few, private philosophies that can contend against these pervasive orientations. And then you have to have a good combination of giver and receiver. The odds are huge.

When one is in a state of some vigor, as I used to be, one can cope with these things, knocking off a chip here and drilling an anchor-hole there and slugging along as reasonably as possible. But a failure of will and nerve leaves one a victim of everything. Some evening next week I will go through my desk at the office and clear it out, and later I will be sorting out other papers at home because I am giving up my apartment.

My sister-in-law dropped by last night when I was at the very bottom of my ditch of despair, and suggested that after twenty-six years of working life, a person may be entitled to one big splattery failure. I agree, but I wish it hadn't happened just now, with all the other difficulties the Center is having. I showed her the first six pages of this letter and she remarked on the neatness of the typing and the good quality of the writing. I guess it doesn't look or sound like the letter of a madwoman; that's the trouble with becoming irrational about just one area of one's life. People find it hard to believe that one can go just PARTLY mad, even though I suspect it happens very often to many people.

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